2025.10.02
When we were invited by Theatrum Mundi, in 2023, to give shape to the graphic infrastructure of the Staging Ground research platform—starting with its online presence and concluding with this very book—our first intuition was to re-evaluate the graphic vocabulary of the French road sign system.
France’s asphalt jungles are punctuated with a rather peculiar typeface family with a typical name: Caractères. The fact that the designers of that remain, as far as we can tell, hidden in a faceless anonymity, is rather revealing. The font, which has dominated the French road network since 1946, seems to have bubbled up from the obscure subconscious of the French Ministry of Transport. We would like to believe that we stand here in front of a genuinely collective design artefact, shaped by countless unknown hands and minds. While aiming for functionality, Caractères nonetheless embodies hidden strata of a psychological backdrop that is very different from, for example, the British, German, or Swiss roadsign systems. There are undoubtedly fascinating things to learn from comparing the inherent convictions of such systems, however dry and rational they may look.
When thinking about using Caractères for the Staging Ground website staging.city, we intuitively placed it on a green background, even if the typeface can be found in the wild on panels of different colors. It was only afterwards that we read that colour codes of the French road system have a broader logic: the green color actually indicates major destinations, including the routes that extend beyond France’s borders, whereas local roads employ white signs. The green sign system seems to have been formalised in 1982 with the underlying concept of route simplification, by identifying important pôles (intersections or hubs) that would facilitate long distance circulation. This process of distinguishing pôles is an interesting one: it reveals a hierarchy of significance where population is not the sole deciding factor, but rather layers of history, trajectory, and connection specific to our contemporary world. For instance, signs directing towards major airports take part in the green label system.
Although it was an intuitive decision to adopt this green code, with its echoes of important destinations (probably something that lodged in our own collective subconscious while driving across France), it also seems significant in itself. Could it be that by selecting this green we reference a debate around importance, priority, and the process of creating monumental simplifications in complex networks of concepts around infrastructure and mobility? Might it point towards a questioning of the main narratives that direct our lives and attention towards the consolidated power networks presently in place: ones that omit if not erase the countless other possible routes, indications, scores or narrations that one could follow, as this book suggests?
For the main menu of staging.city, we selected the exit sign: a rather obvious statement that one has to exit the established circuites of significance in order to redefine the stage. The green colour code is thus staging something like supermodernity, or what Marc Augé called the typical non-space par excellence. One could think that efforts of creating a standardised road sign system within a progressively unified European context enabled critical sign readers like Augé to develop this concept in the first place. What lies behind the signs? Can the unification of road signs annihilate the places they blankly indicate? By inscribing certain places in a system of language, other names, places, and words fall in discredit. We are here in the globalised theatre of a world where difference is pushed further and further away, establishing a dangerously illusionary feeling of semiotic unity, where in reality things are much more entangled with vivid complexities.
This methodology—repurposing the visual apparatuses of obvious power structures—is something we at Typical always enjoy, with the aim of what we call thinking via the negative. This thinking evokes the standards in place, tracking and imagining their knowable or unknowable genesis, seeming to render a form of liberty. It enables the realisation that our current systems, however solid those may appear, are temporary embodiments of values that could and should be revoked or altered. To conduct speculative studies on standards and orders from the past shows that things have been different, and that those will shift again sooner or later.
For example, in a 1960s photograph of the Boulevard Périphérique that figures in Magda Maaoui’s opening essay for this book, we can see that the road signs are using the sans-serif Caractères in relation to a different serif typeface. We decided to do the same here, creating a form of hybridisation echoed at staging.city in the use of IBM Plex Mono to evoke another super-infrastructure, this time from the world of computing. The serif font we added to the melting pot while designing this book is called Spectral, and is used by French government services to typeset notably the motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, subtitling the 2020 brand redesign of the French Republic’s logo.
It is not with certainty that we could say what is the effect of making these fonts collide within the graphic infrastructure of the Staging Ground project, but the intention is certainly in questioning circuits of power. The classic words of Audre Lorde, that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ hang above our heads like the Sword of Damocles. But again, what choice is left other than to grasp the knives pointed at us and use them in defence. Using typeface sets and colour codes, derived from official power spheres, to articulate critical counter-narratives and methods, seems to us just one way to attribute new definitions to structures of power, to design new ways of relating.
Published in:
Staging Ground
Infrastructure, performance, and bodies in movementJohn Bingham-Hall (editor)
Theatrum Mundi / dpr barcelonaISBN EU & World
979-13-990879-0-1